October 7, 2025

lots to state, part 1

If we want constitutional reform, here's the next step: a Citizens' Constitutional Convention Congress.

Back to some constitution talk. We’ve argued:

1. For any nation or state to earn the title of a republic, its public must have actively chosen their government. The best and most practical way to do so is via periodic national conventions attended by randomly-selected citizens.

2. Happily, Article V of the US Constitution provides a mechanism for calling constitutional conventions. To compel a call, we need ⅔ of the state legislatures to apply, ideally for a general convention, uniformly specifying a mini-public format.

3. But before we apply for such a national mini-public constitutional convention, we should do two things:

   1. organize a much smaller national mini-public to design a constitutional convention format

   2. call multiple state constitutional conventions.

Regarding state constitutional conventions, two questions need attention. The second, which we’ll address in our next post, is “Where do we start?” The first:

How do we start?

Mini-publics are decidedly NOT the answer to every question. But this post may not be the one to convince you that I (who have shamelessly called myself Mini Publius) don't think they are.

I suggest we launch our campaign for mini-public state constitutional conventions with… ahem… a national mini-public. In fact, I think we start with the very same national mini-public mentioned in point #3.1 above – the one that would design a national convention; it would design state conventions, too.

Let’s call this assembly, as a working title, the Citizens’ Constitutional Convention Congress. I got nicknames: The Citizens’ ConConCon, CitiCon³, C⁴, SeeForth… To keep it short today, we’ll go with C4. Boom.

C4 would be a design congress. Deliberators would be charged with delivering specific design recommendations for state and national constitutional conventions. How many attendees? How are they selected? When and for how long do they meet? How is the convention facilitated? Et cetera.

They might also be given the chance to offer high-level guidance to states around whether and when to have a constitutional convention. I don’t know what the deliberators would decide, of course, but I imagine something along the lines of “You might need a new state constitution if…”

• …yours has grown too long

• …yours is hard to understand

• …yours is amended too often

• …yours is amended too seldom

• (and so on)

The C4 results would address several needs at once. First, for constitutional convention campaigns to succeed we’ll need to unify around a design or a narrow range of designs to promote. What would be more unifying to promoters of mini-publics than a convention design endorsed by a mini-public?

Second, the mini-public would lend great legitimacy to the state-specific convention campaigns – we’re not promoting the design of some advocacy group, we’re promoting a design from the people.

Third, any guidance agreed upon could help address questions about why states should hold conventions. Suppose, for example, the results recommend that a state constitution should be between 5000 and 25000 words. (For context, the US Constitution is a mere 4543 words, but among state constitutions only Vermont’s 8295-worder is shorter than 10,000). Such a recommendation might land as a solid argument to revisit, for example, the tome that is Alabama’s more-than-four-hundred-thousand-word constitution.

Other recommendations might go deeper into constitutional vulnerabilities (e.g., five states let their governor appoint an attorney general), problematic amendment procedures (e.g., Delaware lets legislators amend without voter approval), or even just outdated language that makes it hard for citizens to understand. All of these could provide meaningful arguments for conventions that would likely resonate more broadly than the high-minded “to be a republic” rationale trumpeted by this newsletter.

Calling C4

OK, mini-recap: we want a national convention, we want state conventions, and now we want another mini-public (the C4) to design the first two.

So now the problem shifts to how we realize this C4 mini-public. How large is it? How are attendees selected? How is it framed? How is it facilitated? Who convenes it? And, of course, how do we fund it?

Fair warning: we’re about to get into the weeds. The rest of this post is about how we should organize one single near-term assembly, the C4. We’ll pause here to let folks with babysitters at home head for the exits. To the lovely, committed folks reading on, bless you. Let’s dig in…

We should start by recognizing that there are relatively few formal constraints here (even if there are plenty of practical ones). The C4 will deliver design proposals, not policies. So the funding can be public or private. The gathering can be large or small, long or short. No government needs to approve it; no one will ratify its findings. C4 planning should be guided by what is feasible, what is compelling to participants, and what is most likely to produce thoughtful, actionable, catalyzing results. I’ll share some initial framing thoughts here, but ultimately the organization of this C4 is likely to be somewhat adhocratic, decided creatively and collaboratively by those willing to work to make it happen.

How to make C4 feasible, compelling, and productive, then. Well, first, to be feasible, it must be affordable. There’s a big range of price tags on mini-publics; large-scale Citizens’ Assemblies have tended to cost in the neighborhood of two million dollars and can last around a year, while small-scale Citizen’s Councils last more like ten thousand. Barring an unforeseen influx of resources during a era of fundraising squeezes, I suspect we will need to aim for something on the lower end of the scale. (A coming “lots to save” post will explore how institutionalized mini-publics at scale can cost far less than electoral systems, but C4 will be a spark plug, not an institution.)

Financial constraints will push for a smaller gathering. A desire for representativeness will push for a larger one. Perhaps something on the order of two or three dozen participants would best balance the concerns. Many common mini-public models – Citizens’ Juries, Citizens’ Panels, Planning Cells, etc. – settle on numbers in this range.

pool

One pragmatic if imperfect way to reduce costs dramatically would be to constrain participation to citizens who have already participated in a mini-public of some sort. This experienced deliberator approach has some rather obvious downsides. There haven’t been tons of mini-publics in the US, so the pool is small and less representative than we might like, especially geographically. And it seems a shame to miss an opportunity to give a couple dozen new folks a chance to take part in a mini-public.

On the other hand, the upsides are beefy. For one thing, selecting among experienced deliberators would dramatically simplify the sampling process. There is no handy public database of hundreds of millions of US citizens from which we can randomly select participants. We could certainly work with public state voter registries, but the project would be ambitious, response rates low, and time demands high. A truly national sample would involves orders of magnitude more sampling work.

As a bonus, sample within those who've taken part in mini-publics would necessarily involve coordinating and collaborating with organizations who have already conducted mini-publics. That work would help build a network needed for the broader constitutional reform effort.

Sampling experienced deliberators would also support the assembly’s learning phase. Before anyone could deliberate about how to design a mini-public convention, they need to know about mini-publics; this pool would already have experience with them. For similar reasons, existing multi-body sortition designs do often restrict some bodies to folks who’ve already participated in mini-publics.

Considering all the benefits, I'm inclined to say an experience constraint is the way to go.

logistics

Another important C4 design question: will deliberation happen in person or online? In-person is generally preferable; it’s also far more expensive, particularly when it involves travel across a large nation. I would be quite skeptical of the online option with novice deliberators; the in-person interactions outside of deliberations are part of what builds trust in the process. Thoughtfully organized online deliberations with experienced deliberators – folks who’ve already come to trust in mini-public dynamics – seems more workable.

As for duration, my hunch is that the initial learning and deliberations might take a week or two, more if spread out. But it would be wise to try to incorporate iteration into the C4 design, meaning that there might be a plan to reconvene the group years later. Deliberators might appreciate (and the design might benefit from) the chance to incorporate feedback from state constitutional conventions, should they be called successfully. These follow-up meetings could be online, even if the initial meetings were in-person. They needn’t be precisely planned or funded from the start, but they should be part of how participation is framed.

framing

Who should steer the process? In short: proven, experienced facilitators using methods heavily geared towards consensus. We haven't yet explored deliberation methods in this newsletter series, but it's important to emphasize how vital appropriate facilitation is to a mini-public's success. Different group facilitation methods can lead groups to many different ends; some methods aim to foster creativity, some to process frustrations, some to combat groupthink, etc. The end here is to produce excellent designs with high group buy-in.

And then there is the question of experts. Who will prepare learning documents? Who will be brought in to provide counsel? The answer will depend largely on the precise questions posed. As a first draft, I’d propose that we ask the participants to address three main questions:

1. How would you design a national citizens’ constitutional convention?

2. How would you design state citizens’ constitutional conventions?

3. What guidelines would you recommend states follow in deciding when/whether to have a citizens’ constitutional convention?

This framing does leave room, I should note, for the participants to decide that citizens’ constitutional conventions are a bad idea. They might answer the recommendation question (#3) by advising not to do it. We certainly must leave this room; without it, no other recommendation can be credible.

But note that suggested framing centers not on asking whether to call constitutional conventions as mini-publics, but rather on (a) how best to organize them if called and (b) high-level constitutional guidelines. If that framing were to hold, the bulk of the expert testimony would need to support rich exploration of how and what rather than whether. So I would imagine most testimony would come from those with expertise in (a) designing mini-publics and/or constitutional conventions or (b) constitutional theory.

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At this point we’ve worked our way from highfalutin claims about what it takes to call your nation a republic all the way down to the near-term need for a single design gathering. We’ve explored the questions the gathering should answer, how participants should be sampled, and how sessions should be organized. But the rather large unanswered question remains: who’s going to make this happen?

Yes, yes, excellent question. So glad you asked. I definitely don’t have a very complete answer, but I do think it will be important to get more organizations and thinkers on board. Ideally a wide variety of advocates would campaign for the implementation of the conventions that the C4 folks design. I'm not sure what role if any I might personally play in a C4 campaign, I’m almost ready to start reaching out to organizations to gauge interest in the idea. But before I do, I want to have articulated a plausible strategy for taking the C4 results and turning them into actual state conventions. And the most obvious strategic question on that front is where? Where should we first campaign for a citizens’ constitutional convention?

Another fine question. For the answer – or at least an answer – tune in next time for part 2.